ABSTRACT
The United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) tends to evoke a strong reaction among those who study it. On the one hand there are those who applaud it as the very embodiment of the aspirations and promise of the 1992 Earth Summit at Rio and as the first ‘sustainable development treaty’ (Chasek 1997). Others are less celebratory about what they describe as ‘Rio’s stepchild’ (Sharma 1999), and dub it a ‘second class convention’ and ‘poor relation’ to other Rio treaties (Agarwal, Narain, and Sharma 1999). Yet even the sceptics acknowledge the UNCCD’s promise as perhaps the first treaty that ‘provides the world with a framework for global and national action that is both just and bold’ (Agarwal, Narain, and Sharma 1999, 186). And even its supporters acknowledge that at times (particularly on North-South financial tensions), ‘negotiations seemed to be nothing more than a debate among fluent tongues and deaf ears; the spirit of the Earth Summit was apparently an ephemeral spurt’ (Kassas 1995, 177).
